Imagine a city where music, theater, and festivals celebrate the rainbow of cultures, where creeks run through and fresh produce comes in daily from nearby farms, where young and old gather in the great places of their community. Summer 2005.

If we are to have the public conversations essential to taking on serious dilemmas from climate change to criminal justice reform, we need forums for those conversations. Media can facilitate the conversations or shut them down, open up or constrain our beliefs about what is possible and desirable. Spring 2005.

Although our political divide is rooted in vastly different stories about what is happening, why, and what should be done about it, people know in their bones that we can't continue as we are. Let's build on that energy to form a vibrant, diverse, and powerful political force. Winter 2005.

Is the American Dream really the good life? Is there a way to live the good life that both brings happiness and requires far less of the earth? Can the quest for the good life be a completely private matter? Summer 2004.

Many think the global movement against unfair trade started in Seattle 1999. But going back over 200 years, people have reached across borders to end the slave trade, shame a brutal colonial regime, and bring respite to laborers of the industrial revolution. Spring 2004.

Whose water? The answer may be one that is both simple and full of implications—water belongs to everyone and to no one. It is fundamentally a commons, which we all must care for, but which none of us can own. Winter 2004.

To use a metaphor from Albert Einstein, our task is to expand our circle of compassion. Each expansion of our circle of expansion teaches the larger society new values and insights, keeps our culture fresh, and deepens the meaning of our democracy. Fall 2003.